To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Despite such differences, Wells considered Anthony to be “a dear good friend,” who never held Wells’s “youth and inexperience” against her. “She gave me rather the impression of a woman who was eager to hear all sides of the question.” Moreover, Wells seems to have realized that her differences with Anthony, when it came to making compromises on the color question, had to do with their very different understandings of the role of women in reform. Anthony was willing to support the Frances Willards of the world because she believed that once women got the ballot all society’s wrongs would be righted. “The wrongs, injustice, inequality, maladministration of the law” that plagued American society would give way to a new “millennium”—which would make the short-term compromises required to achieve it worthwhile. But Wells, by contrast, believed no such thing. “Knowing women as I do, and their petty outlook on life,” she told Anthony, “I do not believe that the exercise of the vote is going to change women’s nature or the political situation.”50

  On this subject, perhaps, the young Wells had a knowledge born of experience that Anthony did not. Certainly, she knew that cross-racial alliances between white women and black women would come no more easily than similar alliances between men, and that white women’s conceptions of womanhood often excluded black women.

  Indeed, by the spring of 1895, Wells was exhausted by her efforts to create such alliances. She had traveled from the “Atlantic to the Pacific,” and “done all that one human being could do in trying to keep the matter before the public in my country and in trying to find that righteous public sentiment which would help put a stop to these terrible lynchings.” “Physically and financially bankrupt,” she returned to Chicago, to take another position on which she and the strong-minded Susan B. Anthony would disagree. Wells had been long considered by Anthony and others to be “married to a cause.”51 But on June 27, 1895, Wells finally “found the time to marry”—as one report on her wedding noted.52 Moving at long last on an event that had been postponed three times to accommodate the bride’s speaking engagements, Wells joined hands in matrimony with Ferdinand Lee Barnett at Chicago’s Bethel Church, becoming Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

  “The Opportunity to Help Unite Our People”

  The Wells-Barnett wedding was squeezed into a busy schedule that had Ida crisscrossing the Midwest “delivering addresses nightly” up to within a week of her wedding day, which did not prevent it from being the social event of the season in Chicago’s black community. Since the bride had no family in Chicago and no time to organize a wedding, the event was organized by the Ida B. Wells Club, which issued five hundred invitations to the “leading colored people from all parts of the country.” The audience it drew was impressive. In attendance was the entire Illinois Republican Women’s Committee—a white organization that Ida had been working with. And the wedding also attracted a popular audience of “fully two thousand people [who] thronged the streets and the vicinity”—making it impossible for many invited guests to enter the church.53 Even the bridal party had to fight its way through the packed streets surrounding the church. But the ceremony went off without a hitch, and began with Ida giving herself away, by walking “the length of the church down the left aisle” on her own, dressed with characteristic flair in “satin en train, trimmed with chiffon and orange blossoms.”54

  For Ida, the wedding was a homecoming as well as a new beginning. Her two youngest sisters, Annie and Lily, traveled from California to serve as bridesmaids—“beautifully attired in lemon crepe.”55 Moreover, Wells invited them to live at her new home in Chicago after the wedding; both did so until they married and set up households of their own. Among other things, Wells’s marriage to Barnett offered her a home to replace the one she had lost in Memphis, complete with family members from whom she had become separated, as well as new in-laws and stepsons. But Wells’s desire to create a home for herself and her younger sisters did not go unchallenged. As Wells remembered it at any rate, the news of her wedding inspired a “united protest from my people. They seemed to feel that I had deserted the cause, and some censured me rather severely in their newspapers for having done so.”56

  The most enduring critic of the marriage seems to have been Susan B. Anthony. Several years after Ida became Mrs. Wells-Barnett, Anthony repeatedly bit out her friend’s married name in disapproving tones, prompting Wells to ask her, “Miss Anthony, don’t you believe in marriage?” Wells’s reaction helps illuminate her hopes for her marriage. Obviously she did not share Anthony’s opinion that marriage was not appropriate for “women like you with a special call to do special work.” Nor was she willing to avoid marriage, as Anthony had, for fear that it would mean “dropping the work to which I had set my hand.” Rather, Wells listened quietly as Anthony rebuked her for taking “divided duty.”57 Now a mother with an eleven-month-old baby at home, Wells could hardly contest the older woman’s assertion that she was giving neither her baby nor her work her full attention.

  Susan B. Anthony, c. 1890

  But according to her autobiography, Wells was unmoved by Anthony’s rebuke. Instead, she could not help reflecting that her marriage had enabled her “to carry on her work” at a time when she had become discouraged. Marriage offered her, she remembered in a curious turn of phrase, “the opportunity to help unite our people so that there would be a following to help in the arduous work necessary.”58

  Wells’s view of why she married underscored that for her and most other black women reformers, marriage eased the economic strain involved in serving as the leader of a struggling community that was hard put to support reformers. Although never well off herself, Anthony was able to rely on speaking fees and the generosity of wealthy friends to sustain her work, something Wells found almost impossible to do—especially since she had siblings to support. Whereas Anthony was an immensely successful fund-raiser who received thousands of dollars in donations and bequests from the middle-class white women who supported her cause, before she married Wells struggled mightily to support herself on the fluctuating income she received as a journalist. Wells did not marry Barnett for financial reasons, but she did come into the marriage in need of a helpmeet.

  An exiled traveler who spent most of her young life perennially short of cash, Wells did not even have a real home when she and Barnett married, which may help explain Wells’s expression “unite our people.” Certainly, among other things, the new home she created with Barnett would offer her a refuge from the overwhelming round of activities that had come to characterize her public life. Only after she married, she recalled in her autobiography, did she finally reach a “place” where she could “rest quietly without feeling that I must be either on the train or traveling through the country to some place of meeting where I was scheduled to speak.”59

  Neither Wells nor Barnett ever saw their marriage as a traditional one. Rather, both of these high-powered individuals entered into their marriage looking for an accomplished partner who would be able to provide support for their work. Ida kept her own name, adopting the hyphenated name of Ida B. Wells-Barnett at a time when married women typically adopted their husband’s surname. She “didn’t want to lose the identity of Ida B. Wells,” her daughter Alfreda Duster later explained, “because it was on that basis she’d made all her trips to Europe” and “done all her antilynching work…[and] her writing.” Happily, Barnett also valued his new wife’s professional profile. Much like Ida, he entered into their marriage looking for an accomplished partner who would be able to provide support for his work. The first black woman to graduate from the University of Michigan, Mary Graham Barnett served as the city editor at Barnett’s Conservator in Chicago until her death in 1888.60 Forty-one when he remarried, Barnett told an acquaintance, “When I do think of marriage it will be to a woman—one who can help with my career.”61 And in Wells, Barnett found such a woman. Shortly before they married, Wells took the responsibility for the Conservator off his hands. She bought out Barnett and the paper’s owners, becoming
the paper’s manager and editor, which left Barnett free to become in 1896 the first African American assistant state’s attorney in Illinois.62 Barnett would hold that position for fifteen years, while making a national reputation for himself as an expert on writs of habeas corpus and extradition.

  Likewise, Barnett supported his wife’s professional career. He clearly never expected his new wife to become a homemaker. He came into the marriage with an established household that included both of his parents. Indeed, during his years as a widower, Barnett had relied on his parents to supply much of the help he needed as a single parent. His eighty-five-year-old father, Ferdinand Lee Barnett, Sr., had domestic talents, having spent much of his life working as a cook on the steamboats that traversed Lake Michigan; while his mother, Martha Brooks Barnett, who was fifteen years younger than her husband, had “taken over” the care of her widowed son’s children after his first wife died. So Barnett had little need of a wife to look after his two sons. Instead, even after he married Wells, his mother seems to have continued to raise his sons, occupying a position of authority in the Barnett household that posed a challenge for Wells. Once the younger couple began to have children of their own, Barnett resolved the situation by moving his parents and his teenage sons into a separate house of their own. “My father…had two homes,” Alfreda recalled. “His mother and the two boys…lived not too far from the house, and so he would get a chance to see both his families.”63

  Meanwhile, the home that Barnett shared with Wells, as Alfreda recalled it, “was almost a business.” Her mother was “busy all the time and not tied down by house work and cooking.” Ida “didn’t like to cook,” so Barnett, who had learned to love working in the kitchen while assisting his father in the steamship galleys, took over much of that responsibility.64 He also employed household help to assist with the other day-to-day domestic chores, leaving Ida free to catch up with the evening papers while her husband prepared dinner. Work dominated the couple’s daily life. Once the family had finished dinner “or even before,” their house would fill up with people, there to discuss professional or political matters. Ferdinand Barnett, in particular, had the “habit of carrying on his business at home,” his daughter noted. Even though he had a law office downtown, he treated his home as an “extended office.”65 And while Ida was sometimes unhappy with the number of guests that her quiet husband brought home, she was “also liable to bring home somebody.” She knew “all the outstanding people of the day,” and hosted many visiting speakers and distinguished guests, as well as leading youth groups that met in her home.66

  By all accounts, the Wells-Barnett union was busy and eventful from the very beginning. Ida took charge of the Conservator offices less than a week after her wedding, while Ferdinand abandoned the newspaper business altogether, taking on a challenging new job as Illinois’s first African American assistant state’s attorney. Moreover, even as she took over the Conservator, Ida was back on the lecture circuit less than two months later, denouncing lynching at a talk in Buffalo, New York. In the interim, exhaustion and the challenges of settling into a new household kept Wells-Barnett in Chicago—although far from idle. An active member of the Illinois Republican Women’s central committee, she served as the president of the Ida B. Wells Club between 1894 and 1898, and wrote regularly for white newspapers in Chicago as well as for her own publication. Pleased to note that marriage had not slowed Wells-Barnett down, The Indianapolis Freeman reported that she was “still giving hammer blows to the lynching industry.”67 In addition, even as they were settling into married life, both Ida and her new husband also had to contend with a terrifying race riot in Spring Valley, Illinois, a coal town one hundred miles south of Chicago.

  The spring and summer of 1895 saw racial hostilities building in the economically depressed town. For more than a year, a bitter labor conflict had divided the Spring Valley Coal Company and its unionized labor force, which was composed largely of Italian immigrants and white Americans. After the end of an unsuccessful miners’ strike in 1894, the company had added racial conflict to the mix when it replaced the striking miners with black workers. The African American strikebreakers immediately became the target of the labor strife that had divided the town. On August 3, 1895, an Italian miner was robbed and beaten by a group of men that the white community assumed to be African American. The following day, a white mob assembled to demand that the coal company fire its black workers by way of retribution. When the company’s manager refused, several days of rioting ensued. White miners, armed with “miners pick, clubs,” and “old rusty guns,” drove all the blacks they could find out of town, injuring more than a dozen people as they pulled men, women, and children out of their homes and chased them into the woods outside Spring Valley. A mass meeting of more than one thousand miners then assembled on August 6 to adopt a resolution ordering the city’s African American inhabitants “to leave the city and carry off their effects” by five o’clock the following day. The next day the group gathered to enforce this order. With the town mayor and law enforcement officers looking on, the white miners force-marched out of town all the African Americans who had not already fled or been forced to leave. “Women and children were driven from their homes, were abused and insulted and their trunks and belongings were dragged about and despoiled.”68

  African Americans throughout Illinois and beyond were outraged. Both Barnetts attended a mass meeting at Chicago’s Quinn Chapel on August 6, where black Chicagoans considered taking the law into their hands and dispatching a group of armed men to defend Spring Valley’s black population. Cooler voices, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her husband, counseled against black vigilantism and organized a Quinn Chapel Committee to provide aid to Spring Valley’s black refugees. The committee collected $1,400 to send a delegation to Spring Valley to investigate the riot, provide support for Spring Valley blacks, and sue the town. But in the end the committee had to complete its mission in Chicago, since Barnett and the two other black men charged with visiting Spring Valley found the town impossible to reach. No trains stopped there during the day—the only safe time for African American visitors to arrive. And when Barnett looked into the possibility of reaching the town by taking an earlier train that stopped in a nearby town, he found that the two towns nearest to Spring Valley were both municipalities that blacks were not allowed to enter.69 However, the Quinn Chapel Committee was able to offer valuable support to the refugees, all the same. In addition to providing financial relief, the committee’s advice that they bring criminal charges against the attackers resulted in several convictions. Those convicted were all recent immigrants, arguably a result of anti-immigrant sentiment among the rural Americans who heard the case, but still they set a precedent for organized resistance to lynching in Illinois that would stand for many years to come, with the Barnetts usually leading the charge.

  “Our Noble ‘Joanna of Arc’”

  Ida continued to make news on the national scene even after she sequestered herself in Chicago. With the British Anti-Lynching Committee still campaigning against lynching on her behalf, and Willard still complaining that Wells was unfair to white women, marriage made Mrs. Wells-Barnett no less a target for slander. Wells had long been denounced in the Southern press as an opportunist and a liar, and just as she got married, her antilynching campaign elicited an attack on black women as a group that was offensive enough to provoke hurt, anger, and a new spirit of activism among African American women across the nation.

  In June 1895, J. W. Jacks, president of the Missouri Press Association, sent an indignant response to one of British Anti-Lynching Committee secretary Florence Balgarnie’s censures. Jacks’s letter was largely an attack on African American women, written by a Southern apologist who claimed to be an expert on the Negro race. “Our laws mete out the same punishment to both white and colored people for the same crimes,” Jacks told his British interlocutor. But whereas the chastity of white women was such that it would cost “as much as a man’s life to
rob her of her virtue by seduction,” black women had nothing to lose. “Out of some 200 in this vicinity,” he wrote, “it is doubtful if there are a dozen virtuous women.” Black women had nothing but disdain for sexual restraint, Jacks maintained, insisting that one such woman had told him that “a certain Negro woman” was ostracized by her peers for not letting “any man except her husband, sleep with her.”70

  Only one of a number of nasty attacks on black women published in the 1890s, Jacks’s letter is less important for its content than for the militant reaction it elicited.71 Instead of broadcasting the letter to a British audience, as Jacks had hoped, Wells’s friend Florence Balgarnie passed the letter to a black women’s club leader, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, editor of The Woman’s Era. A Wells supporter since the Ida B. Wells testimonial reception in New York in 1892, Ruffin had sided with Wells and Balgarnie in their 1895 battle with Willard.72 Ruffin was appalled by Jacks’s letter and reluctant to reproduce its contents in her publication. So, instead of reprinting any portion of it in The Woman’s Era, she sent copies of the letter to her subscribers and solicited their responses.

  The reaction was dramatic. Black women were “suddenly awakened by the wholesale charges of the lack of virtue and character,” a distressed Margaret Murray Washington (Booker T. Washington’s wife) wrote back; while Fannie Barrier Williams later claimed that “it stirred the intelligent black women as nothing had ever done.”73 Acting on this outrage, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin called together the first National Conference of Colored Women of America, which met in Boston in August 1895. Wells was unable to attend, but in her absence, the conference resolved “that we, the representative women of the Negro race in the United States, have witnessed with great admiration the noble and truthful advocacy of Mrs. Ida B. Wells Barnett, defending us against the lying charges of rape, and we take this opportunity of congratulating her upon her recent marriage, and are glad to hail her, in the face of her assailants, as our noble ‘Joanna of Arc.’” 74